Checking out this folder verses the trunk itself may be preferrable for our developers. It will contain all the current dependencies of apacheds so eclipse and other tools can see them all after one checkout. This folder contains externals to the apacheds trunk and the other dependencies that trunk has. The branches pointed to for shared and daemon may not always by the trunk and the externals may or may not be to a writable branch: meaning it may point to a release with read-only http instead of read-write https URL scheme. Before you commit, or deploy stuff please make sure you check these externals so you don't commit to a branch you do not want to or deploy to production non-snapshot repositories.